The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Referring now to FIG. 1, a functional block diagram of an energy storage system 100 is presented. For example, the energy storage system 100 may provide power to loads within a vehicle and receive power from one or more generators. Loads and generators are represented generally by 102. For example, loads may include vehicle accessories and motors for propulsion of the vehicle. The energy storage system 100 includes an energy storage pack 104. The energy storage pack includes individual energy storage blocks 106-1, 106-2, . . . and 106-n, collectively energy storage blocks 106. The energy storage blocks 106 are wired in series.
The voltage of each of the energy storage blocks 106 is monitored by a battery control module 112. The battery control module 112 determines the energy storage blocks 106 having the minimum voltage and the maximum voltage. The battery control module 112 may include a single input for measuring voltage, which is connected sequentially to each of the energy storage blocks 106 by a multiplexer 114.
The battery control module 112 may transmit the minimum and maximum voltages to a supervisor module 116. The supervisor module 116 may perform actions based upon the minimum and maximum values. For example only, the supervisor module 116 may instruct the loads/generators 102 to stop charging the energy storage pack 104 if the maximum value exceeds a threshold. The supervisor module 116 may instruct the loads/generators 102 to begin charging the energy storage pack 104 if the minimum value drops below a threshold.
The battery control module 112 monitors each of the voltages of the energy storage blocks 106 before determining the minimum and maximum values. If the voltages of the energy storage blocks 106 change quickly, the minimum and maximum values may not be accurate by the time they are received by the supervisor module 116.